catheter

Forms

catheter m (genitive catheteris); third declension, with Greek accusative cathetera and ablative cathetere or catheteri.^[1][2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Ancient Greek καθετήρ (kathetḗr).^[1][4][5][6] Köbler connects the Greek word with καθίημι (kathíēmi, “to send down, let down”), formed with κατά (katá, “down”).^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is a medical word of Late Latin: Caelius Aurelianus, in his work on chronic diseases, uses it for a surgeon's instrument for drawing off urine.^[1][4][5]

Semantic evolution

The TLL records it in the Latin medical writers, among them the Latin Soranus, who speaks of pushing a stone stuck in the neck of the bladder back with the instrument.^[2] It stayed in medieval medical Latin, where a list of surgical instruments has the spellings catapter and catater.^[7]

Timeline

• 5th century AD – Caelius Aurelianus names the instrument in his treatise on chronic diseases (dated 401–500 in the digilibLT corpus).^[1][4]
• Middle Ages – A medieval list of surgical instruments has it as catapter.^[7]

Meanings

Noun

1. (medicine) A catheter, a surgical tube for drawing off urine from the bladder.^[1][4][5][2]

Related words

• English catheter

References

1. ^ a b c d e Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
2. ^ a b c Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
3. ^ Conte, Gian Biagio; Pianezzola, Emilio; Ranucci, Giuliano (2010), il Latino: Vocabolario della lingua latina, 3rd ed., Florence: Le Monnier
4. ^ a b c d Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
5. ^ a b c Gaffiot, Félix (2016), Dictionnaire latin-français, new ed. by Gérard Gréco et al. (Gaffiot 2016), online ed.
6. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
7. ^ a b Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch bis zum ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert (1967–), Munich: C. H. Beck; Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften